Book as Object: A Copy of the Taishang Ganying Pian

 

This essay is not really a study of this popular Daoist text as much as an appreciation of the artifact of one copy of the book itself and a bit of a glance up a few of the innumerable paths it, like all other objets d’art, opens to view.  In the last paragraph I venture a few rhetorical firecrackers that might seem out of place in a soberer article. 

 

     My copy of the Daoist text titled Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution, the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien, today transliterated as the Taishang Ganying Pian (太上感應篇), was printed in 1906 [1].  How such a book came to be published -- not only in America, but in LaSalle, Illinois, which might by some standards be regarded as the middle of nowhere – is, unsurprisingly, a story of a few nonconformists.  I grew up near Chicago and LaSalle to me was simply the town by Starved Rock State Park.  In college I had a housemate from LaSalle and I noted his pronunciation of his hometown – “Láy-sal” – with the stress on the first syllable (just as its sister city Peru was called by the natives “Peé-roo”).  [2]

     My book, in excellent condition apart from severe browning of its acidic pages, is a fruit of the business success of a German immigrant, Edward Carl Hegeler.  During the nineteenth century coal and zinc mines were developed in the LaSalle area, in part by this university-educated free-thinker.  Hegeler was a man of philosophic bent who appreciated spirituality yet could not accept orthodox religion.  Once he had become prosperous through his business activities, Hegeler sought to spread his notion of a new sublime vision based in science and uncorrupted by superstition.  In support of his opinions, he became active in the Free Religious Association, a group advocating a rational universal religion [3] and eventually assumed the editorship of the Association’s journal, formerly The Index, as the Open Court magazine, after he had founded the Open Court Publishing Company, which published books as well as another periodical, The Monist. 

     Under the editorship of Hegeler’s son-in-law Paul Carus the company became a significant source of information about Asian philosophy and religion in the West as well as publishing work by Charles Sanders Peirce.  Carus himself had a doctorate from Tübingen and a mind that, like that of the young Augustine, kept inquiring.  Once a Spinozist, he next decided that Buddhism most closely approached his own beliefs and wrote The Gospel of Buddha, modeled on the Christian gospel, in an effort to make Asian spirituality more approachable for Americans.  He eventually adapted Ernst Haeckel’s brand of hylozoism, called panpsychism, terming his own refinement panbiotism, which he described as a variety of monism that holds all nature “is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live” [4].

     In association with the World Columbian Exposition, the world’s fair in Chicago celebrating the quatercentenary of Columbus’ arrival in  the Western hemisphere,  a Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in 1893.  There Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, fascinated the audience with his universalist Hinduism (which was to form the basis for the Vedanta Society).  Among the other representatives of major traditions who appeared at the Parliament was  Soyen Shaku, the first Zen master to teach in the United States.  Carus met Shaku and asked if he would be willing to translate Asian texts for Open Court. Though Shaku declined, he suggested his student D. T. Suzuki, who was to become the most important exponent of Zen in America. 

     Among the projects Carus and Suzuki undertook was the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (as they called it is the old Wade-Giles transliteration).  They produced a curious volume neither wholly popular nor scholarly, spiritual in its final aspirations, but offering a number of rewards short of enlightenment.  The book is designed with care and taste.  The decorative cover, reproduced above, is only the first of its visual charms.  A frontispiece features a magisterial portrait of a grandly bearded Lao Dz looking utterly satisfied by Keichyu Yamada whom Carus then hired to illustrate Open Court’s edition of Scenes from  the Life of Buddha (1898).  Scattered throughout are  curious anonymous line illustrations from late editions of the book. 

     The annotated translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus follows the Chinese text each page of which is accompanied en face by a grid indicating the meaning of every individual character, in this way giving the reader without knowledge of Chinese some insight into the language while providing Sinologists with the original. 

     The book itself, as its English title Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution indicates, concerns karma, the cause and effect of people’s actions, with the intention of inculcating a simple morality based on retributive justice.  Job’s counsellors would have agreed with the author of this little book that every good deed unfailingly brings good fortune whereas every sinful or ignorant act brings an inevitable punishment.  Surely Lao Dz himself, like Job, would reject this mechanism as woefully reductive if not outright untrue.  Indeed, everyone can see in lived experience that it is every bit as common for the good to suffer while the wicked prosper.  Though in practical terms too inaccurate to be the governing principle of many people’s actions, the idea of immediate and perfect divine justice is so tempting  it has received wide currency.  This “myth” in the Platonic sense of a “royal lie,” a “needful falsehood” [6] is useful in shaping people’s behavior, influencing them toward selflessness, even if they know in a way that it is a fiction..

     Though attributed to Lao Dz himself (the “Tai-shang” or “grandly high one” of the title, the main text has been dated to  1164 C. E.  From the first, the book enjoyed state patronage and large editions were distributed as an act of virtue by the sponsors and to elicit good behavior from the masses.  In spite of its association with Lao Dz, the book shows little affinity with the Dàodé Jīng.  It is rather a product of the Chinese syncretic tradition that mingles elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism with local folk belief, one product of which is the Lushan school of Daoism [7].  So great was the book’s appeal as a simple way of performing a moral act by distributing a book which encourages virtue among its readers that countless copies were manufactured and given out by religious laypeople and governmental agencies.  In their “Introduction” Carus and Suzuki suggest that perhaps no book has attracted greater devotion or has enjoyed more readers.

     The proliferation of this particular text in numerous editions over the years was enabled by the rise of inexpensive printing but was motivated in the first place by the treatise’s own promises.  Rather like the Gideons (who continue to distribute millions of Bibles annually), pious Daoists sought to accumulate merit by disseminating the Treatise which was classed as a “morality book” (shanshu 善書), a prescriptive guide to righteous behavior. The Open Court volume follows the model of numerous Chinese editions which append narrations of anecdotes that provide particulars of people’s well-deserved benefits and punishments in the present life with occasional recourse to heaven and hell.  The very first tells of a man who always revered the Treatise and, as a result, ascends with his family bodily into heaven, just as tradition says Enoch and Elijah did.  In the second story a poor but devout scholar pawns his clothes to support a printing of the Taishang Ganying Pian and shortly thereafter receives prestigious appointments from the emperor. 

     The main body of the text is a simple catalogue of ethical mandates, the great majority of which would be acceptable in most times and places.  The author illustrates such general rules as “do not proceed in an evil path” with specific positive advice such as advocating aid for the needy  while denouncing evildoers who lie and oppress others.  Some injunctions warn against improper ritual observance or violation of taboos (such as by needlessly killing a snake or a tortoise, by performing an execution on a holiday, or by exposing one’s nakedness at night).  The book thus constitutes a convenient epitome of moral teaching, a little law-book like the Albanian Kanun by which the individual might guide daily behavior.

     Anyone partial to the radical mysticism of Daoist or Advaita or Chan masters is likely to be taken a bit aback when, mingling with robed monks for the first time on a trip abroad, the traveler sees a pious supplicant genuflecting and reverently placing a package of Mallomars on the altar before a figure of the Buddha, while praying for a new baby, good grades, healing, or a promotion.  A certain suggestive potency does linger over such a scene.  It is, if nothing else, a spectacle of need, a touching glimpse into the abyss of human desire.  And the people, one guesses (or hopes) may be perhaps just a bit gentler than their more secular neighbors, for all organized religions teach ethics, laws, and moral rules their leaders say are ordained by higher powers. 

     Yet surely such petitioners have been as often disappointed in their hopes as often as they have been gratified.  Still they return the next time with the same belief in the efficacy of offerings.  Just as a  disappointed practitioner of juju will conclude that someone else must have had a stronger charm, these ordinary laypeople retain their faith in retributive justice in spite of seeing injustice daily. 

     Ethics are only meaningful within human communities, and Ultimate Reality can have little to do with such moral judgements.  Even far short of that last conceptual horizon (when all bets are off), moral concepts would vanish altogether should humankind become extinct.  On the other hand, in all societies religions have flourished, insisting on a patterns of behavior in part rational and functional and in part ritual and magical.  The Taishang Ganying Pian,  by attributing a systematic account of people’s moral obligations and expectations to a recognized sage, provided a guide to conduct that proved useful for centuries in China.   

     Practical it may be, but the book is warm with the glow of faith and scintillating with the peculiar Chinese fancy which seems never to take itself entirely seriously.  One reason a sinner cannot escape judgement, the reader learns, is that when he falls asleep on Kûng Shên Day his misdeeds will be reported to the Director of Destinies (siming 司命), a bureaucrat of the Jade Emperor Yù Huáng.  The informers are what Carus and Suzuki call “three body-spirits.”  In popular Daoism these are more precisely called the Three Corpses or Three Worms, hostile spirits dwelling within the human body, parasites that sometimes seek to bring disease, but always record their host’s moral failings.  From this belief arose the practice of staying up through the night of Kûng Shên in order that the hostile spirits would not then be able to fill out the proper reports in heaven.

     This sort of thing deems to us altogether fanciful.  Did the Chinese actually believe it, or did they merely welcome the opportunity to socialize through a long night?  Did Carus and Suzuki believe that they would bring enlightenment a bit closer with their republishing amid the flatlands of northern Illinois?  Or did they simply enjoy each other’s company and relish intellectual labor as an end in itself?  Did I believe my mind might catch sight of a bright spark from perusing this book? Or was I, too, only  passing the time, just as another might do with a popular novel or a situation comedy?  And you, dear reader, what brings you here?  There may in the end be little distinction between a search for truth and bliss and just getting through the day.  Both bring one at last after all to evening.  But I find that I am dreaming over this odd little volume, the most excellent characteristic of which is perhaps to stimulate dreaming.   

 

  

1.  My copy was printed in 1944 but purchased perhaps twenty years later.  Like the old Dover company and others in the days prior to the 1979 Supreme Court decision that made large inventories impractical, Open Court used to support their backlist forever.  Today Open Court offers a wide range of titles including a series on philosophy and popular culture that includes studies of the philosophical implications of Mr. Rogers, RuPaul, and the Simpsons.

2.  There seems to be a principle of this rural American displacement of accent to the first syllable.  Another Illinois town is Pekin, pronounced “Peé-kin” and named, like Pekin and Canton in Ohio, because its founders thought they were on the exact opposite side of the globe.  Until 1981 the Pekin school’s athletic teams were called the Pekin Chinks. 

3.  In particular on evolution.  Darwin was a regular donor and a subscriber to The Index. 

4.  Paul Carus, “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” The Monist, Vol. 3, No. 2 (January, 1893).

5.  Among the titles used by other translators are Tai Shang's Treatise on Action and Response, the Treatise on the Response of the Tao, and the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Retribution.  The text was included in volume forty of the Sacred Books of the East series under the title Tractate of Actions and their Retributions in a translation by james Legge, the first Oxford professor of Chinese.

6.  Republic, Bk. III.

7.  In Chinese this is called the sanjiao yiguan (三教一貫) or sanjiao heyi ( 三教合一).  The Lushan sect continues today, including the use of shamans called  "masters of rites" or fashi (法師).

 

 

 

 

A Few Stabs at Li Bai

 

 

     My title is ironic.  With very little knowledge of Chinese (only a year of formal study) I have some sense of how the language works and sounds and I am able to use a dictionary, but that is about it.  As I approach a sophisticated literary tradition as that of Tang China with such limited resources, little wonder if I am uncertain whether I am honoring the poet or injuring him.  The fact is, though, that some earlier poets have published their versions of great Chinese poetry with no knowledge at all of the language in which they are written – Amy Lowell, for example – and that some of the very best – I am thinking of Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth -- had quite sketchy skills.  While my few comments on allusions and images are those of an amateur, I hope they lead, at least, back toward the lines of poetry. 

 

 

 

I.

Passing the Time

 

I saw just wine and missed the sun’s decline -- 

new fallen petals on my clothes appear --

I stand up drunk, the moon is in the stream,

far off birds sing, few people stop by here.

 

 

     Li Bai, of course, has a reputation as a drinker.  The role of wine in Chinese poetry is familiar to Westerners from ancient Greek lyrics where drink is praised as a palliative for the harsh circumstances of life.  Not noticing the approach of night suggests the poet’s temporary escape from mortality.  Though his is a secular sort of meditation, his goal differs little from disciplined contemplatives.  The flower petals that cover his clothes are a further reminder of the impermanence of things as well as indicating a lengthy trance.  At the same time, the beauty of flowers leads to the birdsong of the last line, both endorsements of the charm of the transient world.  The final phrase reinforces the poet’s isolated perspective.   The image of the moon’s reflection in water may imply a tipsy, “up-side-down” state, but it is as well a conventional topos for the ambiguous reality of the phenomenal world, most familiar from the story of the poet’s death.  The expression “mirror flower water moon” (jìnghuā shuǐyuè) is an idiom (in Japanese as well) for an illusion or mirage.

     I use just regular old rumbling iambic pentameter and preserve the second and fourth line rhyme. 

 

 

II.

Question and Answer on the Mountain

 

You ask me why I live in this green height.

My heart at ease, I answer with a smile,

The petals from the peach trees flow downstream.

Alone, no people here, just earth and sky.

 

 

    European poetry has both praise of landscape and contemplative poetry, but lacks the Asian tradition of writing by those who have retired from active life.  This verse suggests the author’s motive, though he does not answer when asked, but only smiles.  The reader, however, hears that his heart is “at ease.”  The fallen peach tree petals again remind the reader of mortality, but peach flowers are also associated with springtime and romance in poems from the Shijing, the Classic of Poetry and in other poems such as Cui Hao’s “Written in a Village South of the Capital.”  Peach orchards were also associated, however, with Daoist utopias in texts such as Tao Yuanming’s 421 C. E. account of the Peach Blossom Land.

     The petals are carried then by the water’s current in a motion echoing that of the Dao in general which is repeatedly described as resembling a stream.  See Dao De Jing 8, 32, 34, 61, 66 and other passages.  The poem ends with everything vanishing, leaving the solitary contemplative eye undistracted, suspended in the cosmic void.

     I have here settled for an enhanced assonance of an elusive rhyme. 

 

 

 

 

III.

Lament of the Staircase

 

The fine jade steps have grown quite pale with dew.

My gauzy stockings, drenched with dewdrops soon.

I pull my filmy curtain down and see

the lovely sight of that full autumn moon --

 

 

     The figure of the lady lost in romantic longing is familiar to lovers of Indian miniatures.  The cultivated taste of the persona is evident from her restraint, the elegant indirection of her lament.  The steps suggest white jade (though they are likely made of marble), so the paleness of their appearance covered with dew is natural.  White jade also suggests the woman’s fine complexion.  The dew may suggest tears, but weeping is not mentioned.  Dew-drops are also used as an emblem of impermanence. 

     The reader may speculate that the glorious moon represents a noble lover.  While the breath-taking sight of the full moon may simply suggest a grander view, it may also raise associations with the myth of Cháng'é who was said to have gained immortality but was thereby obliged to leave her beloved husband, reinforcing the theme of separation.  “Floating clouds, morning dew” (fúyún zhāolù) is an idiom expressing ephemerality.  Though the verses primarily refer to love-longing, the metaphysically-minded might see the “filmy curtain” as the veil of maya and enlightenment in the marvelous face of the moon.

     My concluding dash does not correspond to anything in the original, but is meant as an indication of all that is unsaid.  

 

     The extent to which the poem is composed by reshuffling conventional elements is evident by examining other “palace lament,” such as this by Xie Tiao, a poet whom Li Bai praised.

 

 

Jeweled Stairs' Grievance

 

In the evening, your highness, pearl curtain;

Fireflies come again to rest.

Long night sewn silk gown,

I think of my lord; where can he be?

 

 

     This poem is one of those translated by Ezra Pound.  His version and his explanatory notes which seem to me, with their cadences, still a part of the lyric, remain powerful today.

 

The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance

 

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

 

Notes:

Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

Wang Wei

 

     I write here as a reader of English translations of Tang poetry.  I have always felt altogether at home among these poems so distant in time and language.  To reflect the experience of those like myself who have not mastered the Chinese, I quote from a number of the translators I have read over the years.  Each, of course, offers a unique Wang Wei.  See on this same site “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei” for multiple takes on the same quatrain, including a couple of my own.

     The poems translated by Wu Fu-ning is from Robert Payne’s The White Pony, those by Burton Watson from in Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second tom the Twelfth Century, Pauline Yu’s from Pauline Yu in The Poetry of Wang Wei

 

    Among the classic poets of the Tang Dynasty Wang Wei exemplifies the gentleman-poet of his day, somewhat as Sir Philip Sidney did for his.  Successful in his examinations, Wang served as a government official as well as writing poetry, but then, in later life, withdrew to a contemplative retirement (not to a hermitage but to his country estate).  In visual art he is regarded as a founder of the Southern School, called literati painting, known for free calligraphic strokes.  [1]  

     He excelled in the paired couplets of five or seven syllable lines called jueju [2], a highly demanding form requiring a set syllabic count for each line, rhymed abcb. [3]  Apart from these demands, the jueju must also conform to certain  prescribed tonal patterns (thus its name “regulated verse”) [4].   A caesura is expected and tonal as well as semantic parallelism is admired, particularly in the middle lines of a quatrain.  Furthermore, this poetry of scholars was replete with allusions and subtler associations reminding readers of earlier verses.  Imagery likewise observed a set of conventions, with Images were often meant to suggest conventional meanings (such as the plaintain for physical frailty and the moon in the water for unreality).  [5]

     In this form the genteel might display wit, imagination, and ingenuity and gain recognition among those of their own class, as their work could only be appreciated only by those sharing a similar education.  These highly sophisticated poetic texts, in an ironic reversal, appeared to many Western readers unfamiliar with the Chinese originals to be direct impressionistic sketches of a natural scene.  The immense influence of Ezra Pound and his edited version of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character As A Medium For Poetry [6] encouraged the view that Chinese poetry mirrors ordinary consciousness by emphasizing visual perception.  Thus Fenollosa maintained that Chinese poetry embodies a “simple poetic outlook on life” by presenting the reader with “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”  In sum he claimed that “Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure.”   “The Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue.”

    Though Fenollosa’s pioneering account is now largely rejected by Chinese scholars, Pound’s promotion of his ideas fertilized the Imagist movement and subsequent developments through Objectivism, Beat, and Deep Image poetry.  The fact that very few translators have even attempted to preserve the Chinese rhyme patterns, though similar patterns are common in English, has aided this misapprehension.  The use of free verse by many reinforces the impression that Chinese poetry is an immediate record of experience.  As a non-specialist reader of Chinese poetry in translation unable to appreciate the subtleties of pitch patterns and allusions, I continue to consume a poet like Wang Wei while much of his art remains inaccessible to me.  The immense growth in accessible information in English concerning Chinese literary history has enabled deeper readings of the images though still without broadening the appreciation to other elements of the writing.   Indeed, just as African sculpture almost entirely shorn of its meaning in context enriched European art in the early twentieth century, Chinese poetry refreshed English writing with little attention to the vast and learned tradition that underlay it.  Some of the most influential translators, such as Ezra Pound and Kenneth Rexroth, had very sketchy knowledge of the language. 

 

Morning

 

The peach blossom is redder because rain fell overnight,

The willows are greener in the morning mist.

The fallen petals are not yet swept away by servants.

Birds sing.  The guest on the hill is asleep.

                                     trans. Li Fu-ning 

 

     This poem might pass for a journal entry simply recording the data observed by an early riser.  In this case it might seem a simple appreciation of the beauties of nature, flowers and greenery amid the melodious calls of birds.  A fructifying rain descends like grace.  Those who have no eye for beauty may still be asleep, but the author has included the reader in his delectation of the scene.

     This appreciation of nature is, however, perfectly consistent with Daoist and Buddhist belief.  With this in mind, the “fallen petals” may be a reminder of the transience of this world, and the sleeper may be a soul caught yet in delusion.  These associations are not dependent on association with earlier poems, but peach blossoms have, since the Book of Odes, been a symbol of love, its red blossoms suggesting human passion as well as the returning vitality of springtime.  Yet, the willow suggests for the Chinese the longing resulting from the separation from a loved one (as in Li Bai’s “Hearing a Flute on a Spring Night in Luoyang”) and the mention of “fallen petals” seems surely a momento mori.  The willow  connotes separation while the singing of the birds is a testament to the continuing delight of nature, implying that the properly attuned human consciousness will sing as well.  Yet here the observer, the “guest,” is asleep, unaware of the grand machinery of creation and destruction evident on every side.

     The fact that one may read the lyric as a direct observation of the scene, a verbal cinema verité, and simultaneously as a highly allusive and philosophical rumination constitutes the strength of Wang Wei in common with other poets of his tradition.  The poems may be rewarding regardless of the reader’s degree of sophistication.  They offer a comprehensive and wise-sounding world view while holding all philosophical questions in suspension, an attitude the Pyrrhonian skeptics called ἐποχή. 

  

Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance

 

I didn’t know where the temple was,

pushing mile on mile among cloudy peaks;

old trees, peopleless paths,

deep mountains, somewhere a bell.

Brook voices choke over craggy boulders,

sun rays turn cold in the green pines.

At dusk by the bend of a deserted pond,

a monk in meditation, taming poison dragons.

                            trans. Burton Watson 

     Again, it is quite possible to read this poem as a simple record of a trek, wandering the hills in search of a remote monastery.  Yet it is also an image of a life-pilgrim restlessly in quest of enlightenment.  The harsh rocks, the chill, the close of day all conspire to suggest the suffering of this life that motivates the poet’s quest.  While the monastery bell in the distance and then the sight of the monk in meditation place liberation at a remove from the speaker, it is nonetheless in view. 

     Just as in “Morning” Wang has managed to be precisely and concretely immediate and at the same time applicable to all humanity.  The facts that the paths are “peopleless” and the pond is “deserted” imply the high isolation of the spiritual striver.  Scholars have differed over just which passage describing poisonous dragons Wang had in mind, but it scarcely matters as it is clear that they represent such hindrances as desires and illusions.   If not full-fledged bodhi he has at any rate gained the equipoise to confront suffering with open eyes and go on living, confident that release is as much a part of the scheme of things as enslavement to passion.

     Such experiences, both the direct sensual ones and the contemplative speculations, may indeed be quite solitary, even private records of subjective consciousness, but, as a court poet with some duties similar to those of British Poets Laureate, he wrote public verses in praise of the rulers.  Unlike the fulsome rhetoric of seventeenth and eighteenth century European dedications, Wang is elegant and oblique in his compliments.

  

Written at the Prince’s Command on the

Emperor’s Having Lent to

the Prince of Qi as a Retreat from Summer Heat

 

The emperor’s son bids farewell to the distant Red Phoenix 

        Turret:

An imperial edict has lent the faraway palace of blue-green 

        mist.

Outside the window vaporous clouds cling to our clothes;

With curtains rolled, streams and mountains come into the 

        mirror.

Below the woods the water’s noise resounds over talk and 

        laughter;

Between the peaks colors of trees obscure houses and 

        dwellings.

An immortal’s home would not perforce be finer than this 

        abode:

Need we play the pipes, looking toward the azure sky?

                                                 trans. Pauline Yu 

  

     Though explicitly written at royal command and including the obligatory glorification of the imperial family who enjoy accommodations equal to the immortals’, the poem’s real focus is the rewards of a retreat in the mountains.  Clouds and mist that surround the Jiucheng Palace not only cool the climate, they suggest as well its remoteness from the urban court and create an air of obscure mystery.  The outdoors and indoors mingle both visually as “streams and mountains come into the mirror” and audibly with the resounding “water’s noise.”  The “houses and dwellings” that mark a mundane human presence are obscured (though, unlike those strenuously pursuing enlightenment, the courtiers talk and laugh).

     The concluding lines certainly praise the emperor and his son, placing them on a level with the immortals.  The reference to Wangzi Qiao, a crown prince under Zhou Ling Wang, associates the current royal line with semi-divine antecedents.   Prince Qiao, called Jin, played pipes (and imitated phoenix cries), as he wandered the mountains. Ultimately, he mounted a crane and ascended to heaven. [7]  While complimenting his social superiors and thus assenting to the worldly order, Wang implies that removal from the distractions of the city are likely to prove beneficial for all.  The fine-spun fancy about a legendary prince signifies the spiritual uplift all might gain, even those who never ride a bird to the sky.

      On the other side of the social spectrum, Wang’s “Six Casually Written Poems” concern those who pay no heed to wealth or prestige, the sort of enlightened eccentrics far more commonly admired in Asia than in the West.  For them poverty naturally accompanies a life lived with integrity, but this need not preclude joy. 

  

One of Six Casually Written Poems

 

In a farmhouse lives an old man

With drooping white hair, in his humble retreat.

Sometimes when finished with chores in the fields,

He summons his neighbors with a jug of wine.

Noisily beneath the thatched eaves

They sit around and then stand up again.

Coarse woolen clothes are not too mean for him

And garden sunflower seeds delicacy enough indeed.

If he stirs, it’s just to bring up sons and grandsons;

He has never once gone to the city market.

The Five Emperors and Three Kings

Since ancient times have been called Sons of Heaven.

Compare using arms with polite abdication—

Which way is right after all?

If wishes gained make up happiness,

How then can a rustic farm be scorned?

For now I’ll set my mind at ease and go,

And travel on ‘til all my teeth are gone.

                                         trans., Pauline Yu 

One thinks of the penultimate poem of the Dàodé Jīng in which such an isolated life is seen as ideal.

 

Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them.

I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords (instead of the written characters).

They should think their (coarse) food sweet; their (plain) clothes beautiful; their (poor) dwellings places of rest; and their common (simple) ways sources of enjoyment.

There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.                                               

                                                             trans. James Legge 

 

 Similar sentiments are, of course, available to Westerners more conveniently from Vergil and Horace.  The general idea is that, not military skills, but agriculture is the essential human activity. And that those engaged in cultivation of the land have a more satisfying, a saner and wiser life than those who engage in politics, war, and commerce.  The other poems in this series include one the “crazy man,” Lu Tong, who pretended to be mad to avoid serving an unjust lord, one expressing the longing to retreat from a man still entangled in affairs, another on the poet Tao Qian who preferred drinking to his bureaucratic post, on eon the “husband of the girl from Chao” who drinks and gambles without regard for worldly reputation, and concludes with the touching poem of Wang on his old age, “too lazy to write poems,/ I have old age as my sole companion.”

      One of Wang Wei’s quatrains exemplifies his method in brief. 

  

Deer Park

 

Empty hills, no one in sight,

only the sound of someone talking;

late sunlight enters the deep wood,

shining over the green moss again. 

trans. Burton Watson [8]

 

      The Deer Park in Sarnath near Varanasi is the site of the Buddha’s first sermon following his enlightenment.   The “emptiness” of the first word is a Buddhist term (kong in Chinese, in Sanskrit śūnyatā), here instantly qualified by a vague “sound of someone talking,” though that may be understood as the voice of the poem itself.  The sunlight filters to the forest floor illuminating the moss “again,” implying the cyclic recurrence, reminding the reader of “the great return” which occurs with death.  

     The Chinese poets, far more frequently than those in Europe, pay tribute to the importance of friendship.  Poems on the occasion of parting are common.  Among the most affecting Tang poems are those describing the separation of men who had been close, often on the occasion of one receiving an official appointment in another region of the vast empire.  The pain of parting is then an illustration of the inevitable suffering that life entails, though a testament as well to the warmth of their relationship. 

  

Farewell to Senior Officer Yang

Going to Office in Guozhou

 

Baoxie Valley will not hold a carriage:

Where then will you be going?

A bird’s path for a thousand miles,

And gibbons’ cries all hours of the day.

By the official bridge, travelers offer wine;

Amid mountain trees, a shrine to the Young Maid.

After parting we will share the bright moon:

You should hear the cuckoo’s call.

trans., Pauline Yu 

 

The wildness and presumably the hazards of the journey are suggested by the reference to a narrow gorge, making travel difficult.  “A bird’s path,” after all, is no path at all.  The poet suggests that “for a thousand miles” his friend will be lost in nature.  The mention of sacrifices of wine is another reminder of the dangers of the trip.  The mention of the shrine to the daughter of Zhang Lu, the military leader who, despite his Daoist insight (as a “Celestial Master”) and reputation for humane wisdom, saw much of his family executed for political revenge and himself brought to surrender to Cao Cao, reminds the reader of the tumultuous turns of the wheel of fortune. 

     In a phrase that sounds like it comes from a love poem the concluding couplet with grace and poignance suggests that even in separation “we will share the bright moon.”   The call of the cuckoo became a conventional motif in poems of parting as it was imagined to resemble the words “It’s better to return” (bu ru guiqu)

 

      Perhaps this sample is sufficient to indicate the principal characteristics of Wang’s style and the basis for his appeal.  I and many others have felt such sympathy with him, Bai Juy, and others among ithese old poets?  For me the appeal is the direct recording of experience which, though seeming almost like improvisation, hints at intimations of a universal order, a Dao implied in all the phenomena that swirl about us, a finger on the pulse of the universe independent of revelation.   One need not translate culturally specific mythological terms into philosophic equivalents.  The Tang masters present moments of consciousness, compounded as they are of sense experience and the mind’s treatment of those data, but shaped in their expression by all the poems that went before.  Western lyric tradition is not far removed from the formulation attributed to the “Great Shun” by Liu Xie “Poetry is the expression of sentiments,” [9] but it is Daoist and Buddhist world-views that color the Chinese poets’ emotional reactions in a way rare in the West. [10]  Poets like Wang Wei seem easily assimilable because their concerns are our own.    

 

 

 

 

1.  Named by the scholar-artist Dong Qichang (1555-1636), the terms are not really geographical, but rather an analogy to the Northern and Southern forms of Ch’an Buddhism.

2. A type of regulated verse or  jintishi ("modern form poetry").

3. It is a sign of the level of artifice in the form that rhymes might be based on pronunciations no longer current but accessible in a rhyming dictionary. 

4. Guoyu or Mandarin has four tones.  Such tones play a significant role in a great many of the world’s languages (especially in Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian American) 

5.  Burton Watson, Chinese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 171.

6.  Published in 1919.  Among Pound’s changes were the suppression of references to Buddhism and to the importance of sound patterns. 

7.  The story appears in the Book of Immortals (Lie xian zhuan).  Jin on the crane’s back is a popular motif for painters.

8.  For a fascinating translation study, see Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese poem is translated.”  I add two more of my own in “Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei,” available on this site.

9.  Liu Xie, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chapter VI. 

Agnostic Credo and Vita

I
     I just returned from three hours of rocking, propulsive gospel music by members of the congregation of the House of Refuge in Newburgh. These musicians live in the largely depressed East End of the city with the highest rate of violent crime in New York State. They face racism and poverty; we noticed members of the congregation with track marks and missing teeth, yet the mood was overwhelmingly joyous. Every performance insisted on thanking a benevolent deity for blessings and insisting on the certainty that the worshipper is heaven-bound. Hellfire, even morality itself, scarcely played a part. Every participant was wholly involved, possessed one might even say by the occasion, dancing and calling out and singing in ecstasy.
     I was moved. One might think it scarcely plausible that a thorough skeptic like myself could appreciate the choir. Yet I think the House of Refuge embodies something of the essence of the religious impulse. Their elated acceptance is the opposite of a glum submission to the circumstances of life or indeed to the dictates of organized religion. Untroubled with doubt and little concerned with doctrine, they feel connected to a divine they embrace with the highest of rapturous spirits. Though I rejected my family’s less expressive Protestant church at an early age, I was touched and responded with admiration and envy to the singers from the House of Refuge.
     Lacking any faith, I am an unlikely formulator of a credo. Does the position of a skeptic, believing nothing, lead nowhere as well? One might, like some ancients, argue that it is arrogant and unseemly to deny the common opinion of humankind and proceed then with a spirituality of the majority. One might act on Pascal’s wager and practice religion to be on the winning side just in case. Like many less sophisticated church-goers, those who take these paths seem to be able to believe what they wish to believe. My own beliefs have developed quite differently, out of a lifelong exploration of religion and in particular of mysticism that seems to me wholly consistent with a materialist world-view. Several observable facts lie at the foundation of the initial conviction that such a search is likely to be rewarding.
     First of all, spiritual inquiry might begin with the established fact that all human cultures have religion. This is true around the world and all through history and as far back before as evidence exists. It appears as though belief in the unseen arose contemporaneously with language and art. [1] Such a universal cultural practice cannot be arbitrary but must be radically meaningful in some sense. Much of what passes for religion in both archaic and contemporary times is admittedly self-interested and shallow. People have always performed do ut des sacrifices and conjured what is simply magic, attempting to persuade themselves they have some control over a frightening environment. Yet surely it is absurd to imagine that the Ultimate Reality is in any way concerned with granting a defense against malice, a recovery from illness, a successful hunt, or a fulfilling and exceedingly long-lasting retirement in paradise.
     Yet the universality of the spiritual quest implies an object. It is as unthinkable that everyone desires to reach an altogether nonexistent Ultimate as that human should suffer physical hunger in a world without food. We have as well a rich record, likewise common to all humankind, of the experiences of those convinced they have felt the presence of the holy or have even achieved union with god. In individual cases one might write off the saints of various belief systems as neurotic, psychotic, power-hungry, or sexually frustrated, but the persistence and the similarity of mystical experience around the world implies a deeper explanation.
     As a lifelong littérateur I am familiar with the capacity for the symbolic forms in images and narratives to express the subtlest and most profound ideas and affects. Indeed, I have always regarded art as the most effective instrument for interrogating the cosmos and expressing the human consciousness. Religion, with its myths and rituals, is in one sense a subcategory of art. Our species’ greatest skill is symbolic manipulation, and religion records thousands of years of attempts to concretize the ineffable in forms understandable to our fellow humans.
     The validity of religion as a nexus out of which aesthetic objects are created cannot be doubted, yet its dogmas can. There are some particular doctrinal elements that I find particularly implausible, yet which have appealed to many. The initial governing principle in many statements of religious belief is the necessity of faith, meaning the acceptance of a proposition as true without evidence. To have faith is considered a great virtue, though the difficulty is in deciding which of the countless varieties of “faith” one should adopt. Bobby Henderson’s Pastafarians with their deity of spaghetti and meatballs (including His Noodly Appendage) are consciously outlandish, but logically correct when they say their “deeply held beliefs” have equal truth value to those of any other supernatural religion. [1] Surely it sounds very like flimflam when someone praises the adoption of a whole philosophical and spiritual position on the questions of the very importance without any reason whatever. Suspicions rise higher yet when the proponent insists on the exclusive value of a single brand of belief while condemning all others, yet this is the habit of virtually all institutionalized religions. They advertise while seeking, like corporations, to out-claim their competitors.
     The anthropomorphic personal god described as feeling love, anger, mercy, jealousy, even regret is, if assigned such characteristics, no longer an absolute. When I read that Noah burns a sacrifice and “the Lord smelled a sweet savor” (Genesis 8:21), I cannot avoid imagining the Old Gentleman leaning over the edge of a cloud to take a whiff. This is the stuff of myth – it is what we expect in a two thousand five hundred year old tale, but it is thinnest and least rewarding when taken literally.
     Religions tended to be intensely local and tribal in antiquity. Priests in ancient India, Greece, and Israel attributed their army’s victories to divine blessing and defeats to holy chastisement. To this day groups like the Amish, the Hindus, and the Jews do not proselytize. In effect theirs is a family god, passed down the generations but generally unavailable to those outside their community, surely a concept implausible in deity.
     It is not only inconceivable to me that god should recognize ethnic distinctions; it is likewise impossible that revelation and theophany could manifest at only particular times and places. For instance, Christianity, insisting on the belief in Christ for salvation, writes off all those born in non-Christian parts of the world, many of whom in the past may never have heard Jesus’ name. Christianity invented a way to imagine that the old patriarchs who lived prior to Christ might have been saved, but the whole notion is ill-patched together. Clearly, whatever humans know of Ultimate Reality must be equally accessible at all times and places.
     Morality is a preoccupation of most religions, yet ethics relates only to human society. Good and evil are defined by an act’s effect on oneself and others. In the natural world, and even more emphatically on its cosmic scale, morality cannot exist. Religious tradition prescribes two sorts of rules governing its followers’ actions. Some arise from the thoughtful and considerate practice of social life: prohibitions on killing, stealing, and unrestrained sexuality. These require no divine sanction; purely human considerations are quite sufficient. Other rules are purely ritual. Male Sikhs never cut their hair or beard as a show of piety; Buddhist monks shave hair, beard, and eyebrows for the same reason. The point of taboos is to create community. Hindus do not eat beef; Jews and Muslims avoid pork, the old Pythagoreans proscribed beans. Many groups insist on modest dress covering the body; sky-clad Jains go naked. Some uncover the head to show respect; some cover it. Whether arbitrary or morality-based, human behavior simply cannot be meaningful to the absolute.
     Yet, in seeking to control people’s actions, religions have often sought to make their devotees believe that good character will be rewarded and evil punished, either through heaven and hell or karmic rebirth. There is a symbolic propriety to this reduction of ethics to self-interest, because after all, the primary reason we agree not to assault our neighbors, apart from the fact that many of us may not be so inclined, is to avoid being assaulted oneself. Yet is seems demeaning and childish to promise pie in the sky to hoodwink someone into cooperating.
     I find myself defending the dignity of deity against those who would portray a grandly awesome, quasi-human as god. Very nearly all my objections arise of my unwillingness to put limitations on the godhead. I realize the value of these lesser visions of deity. People have different natures and different routes to spirituality. Some have a sensibility primarily responsive to devotion which might be symbolized by Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria. Devotional worshippers such as those in the Hindu bhakti tradition may require an anthropomorphic god as the object of their meditation. Others may practice good works, recalling the words of the apostle James the Just "Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only" (James 2:24). Such a path is called karma yoga in Hinduism. Theologians may be regarded as pursuing enlightenment through knowledge, the route of jnana yoga, through ideas and reasoning after the manner of Aquinas or Nagarjuna. For me, the divine cannot have attributes, though to some this would amount to emptying the meaning of the grandest of ideas. Yet even in these lesser conceptions patterns are clear and well-established through the world and through history. Partial and flawed though the congruence may be, it is clear that there is considerable common ground on the highest reaches of spiritual theory and practice.
     Not all traditions insist as singlemindedly as Jews, Christians, and Muslim on a personal god. The fact is that a number of belief systems ordinarily considered religious are essentially atheist. At least some varieties of Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism (as well as certain of the Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics of antiquity) construct religions or quasi-religious philosophical systems that do not depend on a supernatural god. [2] Each of these goes beyond mechanical materialism to promise some divine afflatus, some profound joy at the feeling of cosmic connection, a delight in the phantasmagoria of the phenomenal world while recognizing its dependent and ephemeral nature. I might compile a long series of texts, a sort of unbeliever’s, Bible promulgating a featureless deity, a skeptic’s god.
     The first sentence of the Dao De Jing insists that no verbal statement can define the Dao.
     In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the universe is identified with Brahman and with the soul, and Brahman is described as "neti-neti" or "neither this, nor that." Adi-Shankara and others in the Advaita school of Hinduism write of the Nirguna Brahman, which specifically means the god without attributes. The Katha Upanishad describes even the gods as skeptics entertaining doubt. [3]
     Buddhists both Theraveda and Mahayana, acknowledge the fruitlessness of inquiry into the “fourteen unanswerable questions” including issues of epistemology and the afterlife. One could scarcely conceive a skepticism more radical that that expressed in Nagarjuna’s Catuṣkoṭi or Tetralemma : “Any object or proposition cannot be said to exist. It cannot be said not to exist. It cannot be said to both exist and not exist. It cannot be said to neither exist or not exist." His view was the basis for the Madhyamaka school.
     Even in the insistently literal-minded Abrahamic religions, the same worldview breaks through. In Christianity the author of the Divine Names, the so-called pseudo-Dionysius, using ideas already elaborated by Proclus and Plotinus, set forth an entirely apophatic vision of deity. For his translator John Scotus Erigena as well God is “nothing,” but rather “the negation of all things.” [4] Contrary to much of his tradition, Moses Maimonides declares god to be wholly without attributes. [5] I know little of Mu`tazila Islam but I understand it approaches a similar sort of negative theology.
     Furthermore, each of the theistic traditions has produced mystics whose transports are described in such a variety of mythic languages that they may well be considered to share their essence while differing in rhetoric. To those inclined to accept the notion of a perennial philosophy [6] the insights of the mystics are relatively free of cultural specifics and lack the exclusivity that informs most orthodox ritual and theology. The fourteenth century English Cloud of Unknowing suggests that the worshipper who feels even the “kindness” and “worth” of god must abandon those thoughts and plunge into the “thick cloud of unknowing.” [7] Yet rather than striking the author as a descent into a frightening abyss this realization generates an in him an extraordinary state. The mystic may feel the divine as heat, light, sweetness, music, or as an exalted form of love, transforming the ordinary self into an effortlessly virtuous serenity, marked as well by the sort of joy that is visible today bubbling up from the belly of the Dalai Lama in public events.
     The enlightenment of the great tulku for all his esoteric lore seems to me essentially similar to that of the gospel singers from the House of Refuge. Millennia of evidence support the conviction that these people and countless others from all corners of the globe possess something precious, something worth pursuing, something that opens one’s eyes, not only making life livable, but rendering it a delight. For the Pentecostals and the Yellow Hat line of Tibetan Buddhists it may be a simple matter of acquiescence in an inherited tradition, while for others a dense undergrowth of imagery and story must be decoded or bypassed. A total skeptic, I find myself still rooting around in the mudpool of the world to seek the kernel of enlightenment. Neither swine nor divine we pursue the mystery of divinity (and such subsidiary enigmas as death, love, and epistemology) animated somehow from with an impulse virtually universal in our species. [8] One need take nothing on faith; we have records in every generation of those who realized their own relation to the cosmos and thus their own true nature.
     We can hardly know the truth about the universe, astonishing as we find the glimpses given us by astronomers, since we can know nothing that is not mediated by our own sensory apparatus and consciousness. Yet there are many examples of those who turned this limitation into an opening by focusing on altering the subjective mind itself, seeking enlightenment and liberation within rather than information or a helping hand from gods without. While no one can alter the galaxies or create gods by wish-fulfillment, people can to some extent direct their own thoughts, sometimes with dramatically satisfying results. If religion and philosophy are conceived as the search for the best way to live a human life, the mystics, for all their apparent focus on the beyond, seem to have devised a highly effective technology of the mind for living in the mundane.


II
     My path to the positions outlined here was hardly unique. Many others in my age cohort, the first year of post-war babies, read the same books and responded to the same social influences. I suspect a brief sketch of some details of my own development might reveal significant likenesses (as well as equally important differences) with the experience of others.
     A normal middle-class child growing up in the Midwest of the 1950s, I attended church, Sunday school, and vacation Bible school like all my friends. I was encouraged to pray before going to sleep, and I believe that for a few years I did. All the same, I withdrew from this Methodist upbringing in preadolescence. I had come to dread the interminable hymns, slowly winding through six solemn verses of Charles Wesley’s poetry. During the sermons, which tended toward such topics as “Women of the Bible, Part 7,” I invented a system to pass the time by counting the organ pipes and calculating how many seconds longer I would be contained in the purgatory of a pew. I recall during my church’s confirmation classes asking the unimaginative minister incredulously if he thought a pious and humane Hindu man who practiced kindness to his neighbors and followed the rituals of his culture would be condemned to hellfire. The reverend gentleman’s confident response (“Only through Jesus!”) convinced me that, though he had an honorary Doctor of Divinity (and was fond of the title), he could know very little about the divine. Part of the run-up to church membership was to submit a spiritual diary covering the weeks of the course, but I never wrote a word. Until the day I was received into the church I feared that he might fail to include my name from the roll as a result of this omission.
     A few years before I had read Joseph Gaer’s 1929 book How the Great Religions of the World Began, [9] a survey that, for all its chatty anecdotal reductiveness, gave me a good deal of information and more than enough reason to doubt my pastor. I think I was in sixth grade when my parents purchased Life’s book of The World’s Great Religions, and I read and reread and studied the photographs. When my sixth-grade teacher assigned the construction of a shoe box diorama depicting a scene in history, I illustrated the legendary meeting of Confucius and Laozi.
     The next year I discovered Evelyn Underhill’s Christian-oriented books on mysticism, a rich source of quotations from the European mystics, as well as the Dover reprints of the Sacred Books of the East series. I had a look at R. B. Blakney’s Mentor Dao De Jing (titled The Way of Life) and felt at once at home and entranced with the very first verse. I began to consider myself a Daoist Buddhist. Though I found no point of contact between the spirituality I was earning about and my Methodist church by middle school I had decided the highest possible ambition was to be an ecstatic mystic. [10]
     In high school I pursued these interests and began reading D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and Joseph Campbell and paying special attention to Buddhist references in the Beat writers. I discovered that the Theosophical Society’s American headquarters were next door to my home town in Col. Olcott’s grand old mansion with its fascinating Victorian library filled with Asian philosophers. [11] Exposed to Vedanta, I read Upanishads and then Huxley and Isherwood upon which I could only conclude that I was a Daoist Buddhist Hindu.
     At university I followed Huxley and Watts in the use of psychedelics and found the alteration of consciousness with LSD roughly comparable to other methods such as fasting, chanting, meditating, and the practice of austerities. In the middle sixties we took the drug very seriously indeed, carefully designing the trip and discussing its implications for weeks afterwards. I was learning Greek and trying to digest the immense interconnected fabric of ancient myth. I wrote my senior thesis on Christopher Smart’s visionary madhouse poem Jubilate Agno under the direction of an eighteenth century scholar who could only scratch his head over my excitement about this wild work he viewed only as a curiosity. Later in graduate school I made a particular study of medieval mystic poets and translated Mechthild von Magdeburg while spinning theories connecting mystical texts with literary theory.
     Toward the end of my undergraduate years I began attending a Friends meeting, in part to bolster my dossier as a conscientious objector in case push came to shove with my draft board, but also because of a real sympathy for a brand of Christianity without a leader, practicing group meditation without insisting on Christian belief. [12] That they had such a magnificent radical social tradition, not only on war, but on race and virtually all others issues only heightened their appeal. I joined in 1968 and attended meeting for about ten years. During unprogrammed meeting for worship people simply sit silently. Should any one feel moved, that person may speak. After years of sitting quietly in meeting, I was not once moved to speak.
     I not only made a poor Quaker, I feel itchy and impatient while sitting zazen (though I once could pull myself into an uncomfortable full lotus) and I have miserably failed as a yogi quite a number of times even after persisting in what I considered good faith efforts for months. Yet, I think I have caught sight of the footprints of the Ox of Ultimate Reality; I may even have seen his tail disappearing into the thickets once or twice, [13] and I can hardly give up the pursuit now whether or not I ever progress, indeed, whether or not there is an ox at all.




1. Lord Bertrand Russell made precisely the same point in a more decorous manner in his 1952 essay “Is There a God?” when he declared that, were he to claim there is a teapot orbiting the sun between earth and Mars, he could hardly expect others to believe him simply because they cannot prove that there is not. For another materialist’s evidence on the origin of the supernatural see J. David Lewis-Williams’ excellent The Mind in the Cave.

2. Or agnostic or “transtheist, “a term used by Paul Tillich and Heinrich Zimmer to describe those who may accept the existence of deities, but for whom these superhuman entities are not the Ultimate Reality. Of course the Jain tirthankaras are venerated as people worship gods and a Daoist or Buddhist temple will include no end of deities, flamboyant and restrained.

3. Katha-Upanishad I.3.15.

4. Periphyseon, “nihilum” I, 447c, “negatio omnium” III.686d.

5. Guide for the Perplexed, I: 57.

6. The concept of a philosophia perennis was first proposed by Agostino Steuco drawing on neo-Platonic ideas of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The idea was accepted by the neo-Vedantists. See Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.

7. The Cloud of Unknowing, tr. Clifton Wolters (Penguin), Ch. 6.

8. Freud in The Future of an Illusion claims never to have felt the “oceanic” sensation about which Romain Rolland had written him, but perhaps his superego was suppressing more archaic sensations arising from beneath.

9. Gaer had taught at Berkeley and was involved in New Deal programs such as the Federal Writers Project, the Farm Security Administration and the Treasury Department and then served as publicity director of the Political Action Committee for the CIO.

10. It is only in part self-satire when I recall that at this time I considered careers as a mystic, revolutionary, and poet, before selecting the last as the most practical choice.

11. Olcott was an American military officer and attorney who became interested in spiritualism when writing an article for the New York Sun about séances. He was a founder with Mme. Blavatsky and others of the Theosophical Society and, like her, an early American Buddhist. He is well-known in Sri Lanka for his work there with Buddhist and educational groups.

12. Since the early nineteenth century many Friends have regarded Christ as divine only in the same sense that all humans are if they act on their inner light.

13. See the Ten Ox-Herding pictures which occur in many Chinese and Japanese versions and are popular in translation. The best-known version is that by Kuòān Shīyuǎn from the 12th century.